


Orbital Rhythms

by LittleRaven



Category: Interstellar (2014)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-10 01:15:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15280359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/pseuds/LittleRaven
Summary: The stars burn, the planets turn, and everything is always moving; Amelia knows this is life.





	Orbital Rhythms

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wendelah1](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wendelah1/gifts).



Gravity. It should be a word she’s had enough of, but Amelia is a scientist. Physics doesn’t have to be her specialty for it to be vital to her understanding. It keeps you from moving. It moves everything. It drew her here, where she hopes her father will find a way to escape it. It draws her out and away, into the dark, to see the other man she loves. Love, life, her work; all the stars around which she orbits. This is at the core of her, how she can move to others, gravitate to the fabric of life. 

The pull of the Earth. It’s something she shared with all the members of her species, the girl back there left to work. She knows her father lied, and this is the plan. The plan is to make do without them all, because after everything, she has the species there with her. The embryos she is to care for, before going to dream. Amelia knows what she’ll dream of, she thinks; what else is there? Imagining the future is, has been, her job for a lifetime, but it’s impossible to build it without the past, and hers is made of everything the species used to be. 

Her species, the history of it, pulsing inside her. 

The water is cool as she slips down into it, waiting for the dark to take her in. A cocoon, a world of its own. She’s seen too much of it; Romilly was right, it doesn’t seem a fit way to live. Because it’s not living. Of course not. That’s the point. Stasis. A death-like sleep. So life can resume its functions at a later date, like the embryos she brought with her, waiting in their white tubes. 

It’s just a way to extend the waiting. Reset the expiration date and you’re good. She’d better be waiting for something. 

Wolf might’ve felt this way, Amelia thinks. She knows it. The impatience of the patient. They committed to taking action, for the sake of a result. She just wonders how long he stayed awake. He would have explored the planet. He would have walked the rock and dust, clean of pollution in his lungs. How not, after floating between the gravity of the stars? The stuff they were made of. They all needed a reminder; that was good for the health, feeling the ground underneath, knowing it would hold you. 

She’d marked his grave, just hoping he hadn’t felt a thing. She’d known he hadn’t, but you always hope. 

He had to have felt lonely. The last man alive, and the first too. She’s the last woman, repopulating the human race thanks to the miracles of her chosen science. The animals would come with them, eventually. No way to reproduce the old ecosystems without them; they’d have to work the logistics out. The future they, from when she wakes—not the next time, maybe, or the next, but the last. She won’t sleep for a long time after that. Amelia looks forward to it. 

She wants the end of dreaming. This is necessary too, the ability to dream, but she’s had as much of it and more than a body should be capable of bearing. New limits—that’s something to store up. Maybe something to dwell on until the time to take action comes again. Humans are capable of more than they dreamed. Well, they used to say it. They had put it in words. So maybe not. 

More like they tasted the edge of what they could do, and that vague description, “more,” became a promise. One to name. Once named, impossible not to follow. Dr. Mann had found a limit to his imagination, just as her father had, but that is a choice and she’d already made her own. No point going back on it now, already so far gone. She could, and can, only see the rest through. 

It’s over the horizon she goes. Marco Polo and the Vikings, leaving people behind only to find them all over again. People breaking themselves once, then again, pushing farther and farther away and never leaving each other behind. It’s the only way to move forward; carry them inside, and you’ll never go wrong. That, apparently, is objective fact, provable by the series of events after the _Endurance_ left the wormhole, although further study is needed. 

She’ll rub that in Cooper’s face, if flying through a black hole is something a human can survive. If her thesis is correct, he did, love for his children finishing that part of the mission, as her own love took her to finish this part. She deserves to rub it in, and he’ll take it. 

She’ll do it even if he doesn’t take it. But he will. 

Fifty-one years it had cost them, going to Mann’s planet. Twenty-three years for Miller’s. Seventy-four years for not following Edmunds earlier. He’d died before they even left the Earth; it didn’t matter to a body when they found him, as they long as they found the world he’d died securing for them. It matters to her. It had mattered, doing the finding, setting him down to the proper sleep astronauts are denied by their own choice. 

She’d put his dust under the rocks without opening the hypersleep chamber, and she thinks about it now in her own, knowing it’s not a tomb. It’s no one’s fault, and she doesn’t blame Cooper for those fifty-one years. Or herself for the twenty-three. Or she won’t, one of these times she wakes up. Brooding is the same as dreaming: something she’ll have had too much of by whenever this is over, an inevitability of the human state. She looks forward to that too. The last day of dwelling, when her body can be given to more than waiting and after thousands of years of looking up, her mind will know that edge they’d all been dreaming of. 

They’ll push beyond it, into the wide wide open.


End file.
